Season 3 Changes Discussion: Penetration is vicious!

Season 3 Changes Discussion: Penetration is vicious!

Phreak recently announced that one of their planned changes for season 3 is to have percentage penetration apply before flat penetration. My immediate reaction was "Wait, what? You serious?" That is a pretty big change to the damage formula for League. Now, this can all change due to item changes they plan to implement, but I will use current items to explain why this is a pretty big change and why it could lead some serious pain for some people.

That looks painful!

How it works now

Time for a little review. The damage formula for League of legends is this:

Currently, the way the penetration works is that you reduce the stat first by flat, then by percentage. To illustrate, lets do some quick math.

Because of how it works now, you cannot easily reduce someone down to 0 defenses easily. It can only be done if they are already at 0 with flat penetration alone, as you take a percentage of the remaining. So even if you had their MR down to 1, it will not reach 0 through a Void Staff.

How it will work in Season 3

Now how it works in season 3 is interesting. Lets take our same setup:

The exact same build from season 2 gets an effective 14% Damage increase! Now the percentage reduction will always apply to the number you want it too (The bigger one!) and have your flat reduction apply to the one you want (the smaller!) making both types of penetration more effective when paired together. Why would Riot do this and what can we draw from their intentions knowing this change?

Making Burst Mages and Assassins Competitive

Riot has stated that they are planning on making burst mages (Like Annie) a more competitive option over either sustained damage carries (karthus, ryze, Cassiopeia) or Utility mages (Zyra, Morgana, Anivia, Orianna). I believe that the changes to the formula are designed to do just that. While all damage dealers benefit from the change, Sustained damage carries need some defenses to keep their damage going, while burst mages are less concerned about that as they go in, blow something up and get out. Even if a burst mage dies after unloading, does it matter? They did their job. I believe this is part of the intended change to make burst mages more lethal. The same applies to Assassins as well, as I am sure the new itemization will give them similar benefits.

Those that should be particularly afraid are glass cannon builds. A single defensive item is now relatively easy to negate and bring your defenses down to 0. Obviously this is focused somewhat on AD carries, but it applies to everyone as well. Glass cannons will be hurt by burst mages and burst assassins more easily with this change.

The changes to itemization

Now everything I wrote above is admittedly theory, grounded in season 2 items. Come season 3, the numbers could change dramatically on the items but the change does benefit some champions more than others. AD assassins are likely to see flat armor reduction items similar to the ones mages currently enjoy. Making their burst damage so much more killer. As a result of this new found burst, my suspicion is that either we will see cheaper defensive items to make up for the fact it is now possible to reach 0 defenses easier. Or we will see an overall enhancement in offense as many classes get access to more dual purpose items like Maw, Phage and Abyssal.

Conclusion

I have no crystal ball to know exactly what will happen with season 3. But when the company states it might change one of its basic damage formulas, I think we should start talking. Personally, I am very excited for what is in store for Season 3. It seems like they have really taken the time to overhaul a fundamental part of their game and that makes me happy as a player. I look forward to learning the new items and figuring out will make my favorite champions more effective. What does it all mean to you?

If you build armor against a Darius : 1) his Q is low CD and low mana cost. He can harass you with that all day, and get 10/20 pct damage reduction isn't significative enough.2) He has access to the three types of damages, armor only counters his Q and his autos (let's spose W is two autos)3) When Darius goes full in, he generally has Ignite + Ultimate, trust me, it's a pretty huge part of your health pool that disappears in true damage.4) If a jungler ganks you, having wriggles + tabi + chain vest won't matter much, while a simple giant belt might save your ass way more easily.

is that a problem? just because u cant counter everyone with the same defensive stat doesnt mean that stat is worthless, infact i would agrue that having two stats that could counter everyone besides the half dozen true dmg champs was a bad thing and probably why ignite was considered so strong this season

"The exact same build from season 2 gets an effective 14% Damage increase! Now the percentage reduction will always apply to the number you want it too (The bigger one!) and have your flat reduction apply to the one you want (the smaller!) making both types of penetration more effective when paired together. Why would Riot do this and what can we draw from their intentions knowing this change?"

Nope. They've stated systematic penetration number changes to account for the calculation changes.

In addition to improving burst champions, I think this change is also aimed to give ADs more rune choices. Currently, almost everybody runs flat AD because it widens the opportunities you have to last hit and allows you to farm better compared to armor pen. Armor pen is only a little better at certain points in the game, and when you get last whisper the way % the effective armor your enemy has is not that different when comparing just LW or LW + penetration runes.

As such, this makes the increased farming from flat AD more desirable in general. That said, with the change to percentage reduction I think Riot is hoping to give AD carries more choices to make in their runes, since running the penetration will actually matter a lot more when it comes to late game, so there will be more incentive to run penetration runes at the cost of hindering farming.

In fact, they did not talk about changing MPen flat & percentage but only ArmorPen. Maybe it will be both and they did not mention MPen, but the posted message mentioned ArmorPen only and really seemed biased towards AD assassins like Pantheon & Talon.

If they did mention MPen, could you link the post on the redtracker?

Anyways, thanks for all the informative posts we see on the blog, it's always very nice to read.

It is safe to assume that Mpen will be treated the same way given it is currently treated the same way as ArmPen is now. The calculation for damage reduction from Magic Resist is the same as Armor. To have 2 different calculations for ArmPen and Mpen would put a needlessly large burden on coding and create an unfair advantage in game.

Sureit does, 100-(100*.46)-20-20=14 or ~12% damage reduction. Also did you know that flat reduction can actually bring someone below 0 mitigation? If flat reduction is changed so that it is applied last, AD carries are gonna have a real bad time.

Reduction is always applied first. They're not changing this. The only way you can reduce people below zero is corki with a black cleaver. I suppose with some %reduction abilities it could work with the right armor level, but it's hard.